Cartel violence continues unabated across the border

File: In this file photo Mexican soldiers unload bundles of seized marijuana before incinerating the drugs at a military base in Tijuana, Mexico, on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010. That week authorities had carried out the biggest marijuana bust in Mexico's history. With approximately 134 tons of marijuana headed for the U.S. were confiscated by soldiers and police. Mexico impounded more than 7,400 tons of marijuana in 2010. Photographer: David Maung/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Bloomberg via Getty Images) less

File: In this file photo Mexican soldiers unload bundles of seized marijuana before incinerating the drugs at a military base in Tijuana, Mexico, on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010. That week authorities had carried ... more

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File: In this file photo Mexican soldiers unload bundles of seized marijuana before incinerating the drugs at a military base in Tijuana, Mexico, on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010. That week authorities had carried out the biggest marijuana bust in Mexico's history. With approximately 134 tons of marijuana headed for the U.S. were confiscated by soldiers and police. Mexico impounded more than 7,400 tons of marijuana in 2010. Photographer: David Maung/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Bloomberg via Getty Images) less

File: In this file photo Mexican soldiers unload bundles of seized marijuana before incinerating the drugs at a military base in Tijuana, Mexico, on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010. That week authorities had carried ... more

Cartel violence continues unabated across the border

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REYNOSA, Mexico — When the shooting began, Daniel Cerda Salinas, an evangelical minister, took refuge in his neighbor's home.

As the battle raged late into the night of March 10, Salinas began to question his faith in President Enrique Peña Nieto, the man he believed would free Reynosa from the paralyzing grip of Mexico's drug cartels.

“It's worse than before,” Salinas, 37, said of cartel fighting. “We don't know when the shooting will begin, and we don't know what to do, except trust in God.”

Over the next week, cartel gunmen clashed on at least four occasions in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, blocking off sections of the city while residents waited in terror for the fighting to end. Official reports downplayed the carnage, but social media captured blood-stained streets and bullet-riddled, burned-out cars.

Since Peña Nieto took office Dec. 1, the drug war clashes that claimed tens of thousands of lives during the six-year administration of his predecessor have carried on at a dizzying pace, casting doubt on the president's strategy to reduce violent crime.

Peña Nieto has pledged a less militaristic approach than the previous administration, touting social programs aimed at crime prevention, but the details are unclear.

For average citizens, little has changed, according to Jesús Uriel Martínez Mata. Cartel hawks stake out the city's main thoroughfares in plain view of municipal police who stand by idly as shiny SUVs flag activity deemed suspicious.

Last month, the 29-year-old public employee had his vehicle taken at gunpoint and used as blockade during a firefight. Despite assurances that a new strategy to combat violence is being implemented, Martínez has yet to see evidence that a plan exists.

“Every day, more people lose their lives, whether they are involved (in crime) or innocent,” Martínez said. “At this point, we can't believe the government is going to come out ahead.”

The president's plan to reduce crime will pour $9 billion into programs aimed at steering young people away from crime and drugs, not unlike a program former President Felipe Calderón established in Ciudad Juárez.

But in practical terms, the biggest change, albeit incomplete, has been the centralization of security policy in the Interior Ministry. And in a break from Calderón's reliance on federal police and the Mexican military, the administration says it will create a gendarmerie, or paramilitary force, to take on the country's most serious threats.

But school administrators have yet to receive guidance on new programs, the gendarmerie is still months from being formed and the bloodshed continues unabated. While it's perhaps too early to expect results, Alejandro Hope, an analyst and former Mexican intelligence officer, said it's not too much to ask for a better-laid-out strategy.

“Some of the key tenets of the new policy have not been fully explained or have been poorly implemented,” Hope said.

Recent bloodshed in the southwestern state of Michoacán, including the slayings of seven men found propped up in white plastic chairs and shot in the head, and in the neighboring state of Guerrero have given rise to myriad civilian defense groups taking the law into their own hands.

And in Nuevo Laredo, where the police chief has been missing for about two months, grenades were detonated in February outside the U.S. Consulate during a spate of gang fighting.

In Reynosa, the latest round of violence is the result of continued fallout after reputed top Gulf Cartel leaders Mario Cardenas Guillen and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez were arrested last year, destabilizing the organization and sparking an internal power struggle that has resulted in a wave of deadly fighting in recent weeks.

Since then, Michael “Gringo” Villarreal has attempted to wrest control from Mario “Pelon” Ramirez Treviño in a series of dramatic gunbattles in which authorities reported about a dozen dead, despite unofficial accounts that put the number several times higher.

By some unofficial estimates, the death toll in March soared to 50 or higher.

“Whatever Peña Nieto tries to do, there's going to be a lag effect from the Calderón administration,” Shirk said.

What remains to be seen, he added, is the strategy that Peña Nieto's administration will take as cartel feuds are resolved.

Peña Nieto's pledge to downsize the federal footprint might explain the absence of federal police patrols on the streets of Reynosa, but answers are hard to come by through official channels.

The attorney general's office, which stopped giving interviews two years ago, has become even quieter under Peña Nieto. In the past, it wasn't unusual for the government to churn out 20 bulletins per day, heralding blows scored against criminal groups. But that number has shrunk to fewer than a dozen in four months, mostly about the vetting of police ranks.

“We're building cases instead of announcing arrests,” said an official who asked that his name not be published because he is not authorized to speak about it.

After the smoke cleared from one particularly heavy day of cartel fighting, officials said just two victims were found, a 37-year-old taxi driver and an 8-year-old boy, seated in a car next to his father. Officials seized 22 vehicles.

One officer who surveyed the aftermath insisted that his investigators had found just two dead.

“All I can tell you is what we found,” he said. If more died in the melee — he shrugged his shoulders and blushed — their bodies had been removed by the time he arrived.

This is one of the many vagaries of the drug war in which counting the dead is largely a matter of speculation. By some estimates, there were more than 60,000 homicides during the six years under Calderón, though some analysts question the accuracy of statistics that exclude the thousands of disappeared.

“Talking about absolute numbers is a pretty bad indicator of the direction security is going,” said analyst Hope, who works for the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness. “In the end, the trend is more important than the absolute level, and violence might be going down nationally.”

On the ground, the absence of federal police is conspicuous, but one officer said their presence had not been diminished. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the officer explained that in the past, law enforcement confronted organized crime independently, whereas now, all law enforcement agencies are working together through a unified system to respond en masse to armed confrontation.

The officer rattled off seizures of marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth while downplaying the expectations of a community in which criminal activity permeates all levels of society and social media is given to exaggerate the violence, he said.

“I keep looking for the elephant and clowns that were laid out from the circus,” he said. “The truth is if we minimize things, the public magnifies them.”

George W. Grayson, a professor at the College of William and Mary and an expert on Mexican violence, said the government is still getting organized, deciding what unit will take the lead in the drug war and how to put together an entirely new force.

“To mix metaphors, the government is just finding its sea legs,” Grayson said.